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Paper short abstract:

By viewing events via the tripartire structure of ritual, the anthropology of events, crises, and revolutions has fed into a modernist perspective on socio-political disorder that requires resolution. What happens when we focus on the present without placing it in a sequence from disorder to order?

Paper long abstract:

In the midst of their country’s liberal democratic transition after its revolution, a collective of Tunisian left militants revive the ciné-club assembly as an occasion for public film screening and discussion. Through its long imbrication with political dissent, the ciné-club proposes a format for experiencing citizenship that jars with some of the most prominent normative frames of liberalism. Insofar as it introduces different chronotopes in an otherwise tightly defined liberal present, the ciné club constitutes what I call an “event of citizenship”. In this paper, I explore the differential effects of the ciné club event on the Tunisian social fabric in relation to different temporal frames. Specifically, I ask what happens when the ciné club assembly is seen through the lens of a national past in need of recalibration and through the futurist prism of transitional justice. I compare the above with the unfolding of the ciné club in the present tense. I suggest that the ciné club assembly in the present moment proves to be a revolutionary occurrence in the midst of liberal agreement, a liberal agreement sustained through both memory-making projects and the futurism of transitional justice. The paper argues that paying heed to the present allows us to reverse or even collapse the modernist sequencing of revolution to democracy, which is preserved in anthropology’s use of ritual theory to analyze crises and revolutions (Thomassen 2012). The reversal of this sequencing complicates the ontological difference between revolution and democracy and indicates that they are highly porous experiences.